Moscow Mule
"Moscow Mule" is the eighth episode of Season One, and the eighth overall episode of'' Orange Is the New Black. Synopsis Red gets pressured to smuggle drugs through her kitchen; Larry publishes an article about Piper in the "New York Times;" two babies come into the world. Plot Present The flu is rapidly spreading at Litchfield, and the majority of inmates have gotten sick. As daily medications are being administered, Daya vomits into a nearby trash can. Back in her bunk, Piper makes facemasks out of maxipads for her and Claudette to keep from getting sick. Claudette puts hers on and says she looks like Michael Jackson. Piper says Claudette has the wrong skin tone and that SHE actually looks like Michael Jackson and dances out of her bunk. Piper is then seen in the cafeteria. Healy approaches telling her he read Larry’s article about her in the New York Times. He does not let Piper read it, throwing it in the trash and pouring coffee on it. Piper tries to remove it from the garbage but is reprimanded by Wanda Bell. Back in the line for the nursing station, Maria says she has gone into labor. Norma is dying Red’s hair in the kitchen. Mendez enters, claiming he is there to do Red a favor. He tells her that Tricia was going through withdrawal but Red says all her girls are clean from drugs. Red says it is Mendez’s problem to deal with, and realizes that Mendez had been supplying Tricia with drugs the whole time she has been incarcerated. Larry is purchasing a bunch of copies of the New York Times, and told the man in line next to him that he wrote a column in it. He is proud of himself and the vendor is impressed, treating him like he is a celebrity. When he gets home, Larry receives a call from Piper saying she knows about the article getting published. He reads the title of the article “Once Sentence, Two Prisoners”, which Piper says sounds like 2 girls one cup. Larry overhears moaning on the other end of the line, asking if it is porn. Piper thinks Maria might be in labor and asks Larry to Google search for symptoms of labor so she can guess the time the baby will be born. Whoever guesses closest wins a Twix bar. Maria is unable to go to the hospital until her contractions are less than a minute apart. Larry explains that Pete and Polly are organizing a party for him to celebrate his article’s publication, and Piper feels left out but she says she is happy for him and his accomplishment deserves to be celebrated. He then reads the article to her. Gloria and Aleida are walking back and forth in the hallway with Maria to get her contractions to speed up. Maritza brings her a pineapple soda as Aleida said she was told to eat a whole pineapple to ease her labor. Gloria suggests Maria should play with her breasts to get her hormones going. Piper goes to work at the electrical shop finding that Nicky is the only one there, everyone else is sick. Nicky says she stockpiles cough syrup from commissary and she has drank enough to make Lil Wayne vomit in his dreads. Luschek tells the pair that a dryer is broken in the laundry room and assigns them to fix it. Many inmates are in the library and Claudette appears to be looking into her appeal. Poussey has just started working there and is not sure where to shelve a book because the label fell off. Taystee tells her where to put it. Poussey asks how her appeal went and Taystee isn’t sure. Poussey says at least her hair looked good and Taystee agrees. Alex is working in the laundry room when Nicky and Piper show up to fix the dryer. Nicky jokingly talks dirty to Alex about fixing the dryer. Next, Norma tries to get Nicky’s attention by throwing things at her from outside of the room, as she is afraid of the spin cycle. Red needs her for something and Nicky leaves. Alex says Piper looks good in her tool belt. Red is angry about Tricia using drugs but Nicky defends her saying she is an addict who made a mistake and she needs another chance. Red says Tricia gets no more chances. She has already gotten two strikes, Russians don’t play baseball. Nicky tells Red not to take it personally, that drugs make people do things they don’t want to do. Red says so does she. Piper is trying to fix the dryer but admits she has no idea what she is doing. Alex reveals that Wanda Bell dropped off laundry with C.O. Scott O’Neill ’s name stitched in a pair of boxers, indicating that the two are sleeping together. Pennsatucky insults and glares at the pair and leaves. Alex says she will help Piper with the dryer because she knows the machines better, even though Piper will get in trouble if she is caught not performing her job. Tricia is in her bed sweating profusely from detoxing. Nicky brings her some orange juice and tells her stories about how she made exorcist jokes at a drug clinic she had gone to. Tricia says her timing is good because everyone will think she just has the flu, and nobody needs to find out she was using drugs. Nicky says Tricia needs to tell the C.O.s and that Red can’t cover for her anymore. Tricia is upset saying that she will go to the SHU is she confesses this and that Nicky is supposed to be her family, to which Nicky says “Not anymore”. As Nicky walks away, Tricia begs for Nicky not to leave. Nicky feels remorseful but knows that she did what she needed to do by cutting off Tricia for the time being. Maria is still in labor and is waiting to go to the hospital. She says to Daya that the relationship between her and Aleids is so dysfunctional that they would make teens want to abstain from having sex. Nurse Igme Dimaguiba informs Maria that the hospital van is there and escorts her out to have the baby. Alex has gotten into the dryer to fix the motor while Piper holds a flashlight. When Piper’s batteries die she leaves to get more. Alex’s glasses was falling off and Pennsatucky ends up locking Alex in the dryer. Caputo meets with Mendez to discuss Tricia’s detoxing. He explains that she has been at the facility for 10 months, questioning why she hadn’t detoxed earlier. He concludes there must have been product coming in somehow. Mendez thinks it is probably an isolated incident. Caputo says that he will not go down for this, hinting that he would put the blame on Mendez instead. Caputo also asks if moustaches are now a sign of being gay because a man checked him out, but Mendez says moustaches are for manly straight men. Piper returns to the laundry room. Her first instinct is to get help to open the door but Alex does not want Piper to get in trouble. Alex demands Piper to step up and get her out, and begs her not to leave her. Mendez obtains a list of all the vendors who bring goods into the prison. He then sees Lorna driving in and thinks that she might be involved in smuggling things in or at least knows something about it. Alex still in dryer says she has been waiting for Piper to come around. Piper says she is engaged and Alex laughs. Piper thinks it is possibly that the two of them will get friendly again but Alex reminds Piper that they were never friends in the first place. She loved Piper and loved having sex with her, but that she meant wants her to come around to treat her like a human being, not romantically. When Piper tries to kicks the dryer in frustration, Luschek comes in to check on her and sees Alex in the dryer. Mendez gets in the van with Lorna, and makes her drive far from the prison. She is nervous. He asks about how Red gets contraband items in the prison, threatening that it will not be pleasant for her if she doesn’t answer. Lorna claims that she just drives and she can’t tell him what she does not know, covering for Red. Mendez then instructs her to drive back. Luschek turns Piper and Alex in to Healy following the dryer incident. Piper says it is her fault because she asked Alex to help her. Healy says in the past he found two naked women using the dryers to pleasure themselves and asks if this is the same situation and Alex ends up punching Pennsatucky in the face and one kicks her in the stomach and fifteen kicks in her the face to get bullying and Healy was shows up and stops to Alex for beating Pennsatucky up and he takes her to his office and Piper kicking one Pennsatucky in the face. Norma has moved into Nicky’s room after Tricia is gone, and Nicky is furious at Red for it. Mendez sees the confrontation between Red and Nicky and knows he can take advantage of the situation. There is a brief flashback to Red meeting with the Russian men. They are discussing how they have worked out some sort of deal, but it is not entirely clear what their business is involved with. On the outside, Larry is sulking a bit at his party. Polly says it must be hard for him without Piper but that she would want him to have a good time. Larry says he knows he is luck that he is published, young, healthy, and alive but can’t shake the feeling that what he has is not enough. He thinks this makes him selfish and ungrateful, and at that moment Polly goes into labor. She asks Larry to take her to the hospital immediately. Claudette and Piper are laying in their beds and Claudette asks what her visits with Larry are like. Piper says it's good, correcting herself saying it's weird. She says sometimes it seems like there is not enough time, and sometimes there is too much and they can only look at each other for so long. Sometimes they need to look away. Piper asks why Claudette has never had a visitor to which Claudette says she just likes to look away. Piper is on the phone with Larry. He is at the hospital after rushing Polly there to have the baby. He explains how Pete forgot his wallet to pay the cab driver and the two got into a fight. He adds that people were asking about Piper at the party and said he captured her spirit well in the article. Piper disagrees and says the girl he wrote about is not her. She is also upset that she missed his party and that she couldn’t be there when her best friend had a baby, so she feels like a bad person. Maria has returned from the hospital and all the inmates in the common room playing games go silent, as they feel sympathy for her situation. Nicky is listening to music in the chapel when Mendez enters, questioning her about Red’s operation. Nicky immediately says that Red gets contraband in from Neptune’s Produce, and to leave her alone. This information was easier to get than Mendez was expecting. Taystee sits down to lunch with Poussey. She heard back from the board that she is getting out of prison soon. The two are excited. Alex has fallen ill from the flu, and tells Piper that she is plotting revenge on Pennsatucky; Piper says she may want in. Piper tells Alex that Larry wrote a story about her prison experience, but he got so much of it wrong. She resents being someone’s story, and that he makes her life seem like an adventure that you tell someone at a cocktail party. The two hold hands and Piper sneezes, also having caught the flu. Daya’s mother Aleida brings her a bucket in case she gets sick and vomits again. Daya says the other inmates have been getting better, so she will soon too. Aleida says Daya doesn’t have what everyone else has, and that she will be better in 9 months, indicating that Daya does not have the flu, but is pregnant. Flashbacks '''Note: Flashbacks are arranged in chronological order, not the order in which they occur on the show.' Red A flashback shows a group of Russian men discussing the best way to move ‘product’. Red tells them a story about how her father sold candy to soldiers on an army base, and the men laugh at her after she leaves. There is a brief flashback to when Red first entered prison. She is introduced to Norma, who is to show her the ropes around the kitchen when she starts working there. Red eyes a familiar Neptune’s Produce box, a business that she seems to have had connections with before being incarcerated. In present day, Mendez stops the Neptune’s Produce truck at the gate to have a talk with the driver. Piper Chapman In another flashback with a different plot, Piper is taking a pregnancy test, saying she thinks she might want to keep the baby. Larry says they don’t even know if there is a baby yet and even if there was, Piper is going to prison in 3 months and it's not an option. He says he is supportive of her decision but she should consider abortion. He wants to have a family with her but doesn’t seem to be ready for it, saying he was scared for Polly and Pete when they told him they were expecting. Piper looks at the test and says she feels sad, suggesting she was not pregnant. Cast Main Cast *Taylor Schilling as Piper Chapman *Laura Prepon as Alex Vause *Michael Harney as Sam Healy *Michelle Hurst as Miss Claudette *Kate Mulgrew as Galina "Red" Reznikov *Jason Biggs as Larry Bloom Guest Stars *Danielle Brooks as Taystee *Dominic Colon as Manny *Cory Fernandez as Arturo *Joel Marsh Garland as Scott O'Neill *Annie Golden as Norma Romano *Selenis Leyva as Gloria Mendoza *Taryn Manning as Pennsatucky *Matt Peters as Joel Luschek *Elizabeth Rodriguez as Aleida Diaz *Nick Sandow as Joe Caputo *Samira Wiley as Poussey Washington Special Guest Stars *Natasha Lyonne as Nicky Nichols *Pablo Schreiber as George Mendez Co-Stars *Uzo Aduba as Crazy Eyes *Madeline Brewer as Tricia Miller *Catherine Curtin as Wanda Bell *Maria Dizzia as Polly Harper *Lolita Foster as Maxwell *Beth Fowler as Sister Ingalls *Diane Guerrero as Maritza *Gregory Korostishevsky as Dmitri *Tony Naumovski as Oleg *Jessica Pimentel as Maria Ruiz *Dascha Polanco as Dayanara Diaz *David Ross as Ganya *Kaipo Schwab as Igme Dimaguiba *Nick Stevenson as Pete Harper *Yael Stone as Lorna Morello *Tamara Torres as Weeping Woman Category:Season 1 Episodes